Studies in Musical Theatre - 2021 Song, Stage, and Screen Conference Papers, Dec 2022

Beginning with its title, Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s 2004 musical Caroline, or Change encloses a dichotomy between movement and stillness. The word ‘change’ is associated with Caroline, the eponymous protagonist, a Black maid who defiantly resists and refuses even the smallest manifestations of turmoil that arise in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A static play, Caroline, or Change contradicts usual expectations of musical theatre’s capacity to generate the hopeful and soaring movements generally associated with utopia. This article argues, however, that far from fixating the musical within monolithic representations of history and Black women, Caroline, or Change’s stillness seems to offer a redefinition of utopia. Caroline explores moments of stasis as tipping points, in between mobility and immobility, that particularly highlight female performances’ capacity to transform the very genre of the musical.

This article interrogates representations of ethnicity in the long-lived musical play Rose-Marie from 1924, with music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart, book by Otto Harbach, and lyrics by Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II, and its subsequent MGM film adaptations in 1936 and 1954. The story is set in Canada, and images of Indigenous people include white-created tropes of children of nature, vicious savages and drunkards. These views are manifested aurally through Indianist musical tropes of the time, and are especially evident in ‘Indian Love Call’ and ‘Totem-Tom-Tom’. Whiteness is performed opposite portrayals of Indigenous people that range from the ‘noble savage’ of the famous ‘Indian Love Call’ to Wanda, a First Nations woman characterized as violent and over-sexualized in the 1924 and 1954 versions. Friml’s multifarious score includes recognizable Indianist tropes of the time as well as quintessential operetta and musical comedy fare, thus musicalizing cultural differences through established Eurocentric means. In Rose-Marie, the title character’s mobile ethnicity shifts from being presumably French-born French Canadian in the original to English Canadian in the 1936 film (starring Jeanette MacDonald) and French Canadian in the 1954 version (starring Ann Blyth). Although Rose-Marie and Wanda behave in similar ways, Rose-Marie’s singing whiteness allows her to become a romantic lead, whereas Wanda, whose dance-dominated performance mode emphasizes a sensual physicality, is vilified because of her ethnic heritage.

After the 1968 Soviet invasion, the people of Czechoslovakia could not avoid the presence of Soviet culture, which was a symbolic manifestation of subordination to the Soviet hegemony. When researching the theatre culture of this era, one comes across a very specific tension between the state’s cultural politics, the principles of theatres’ repertoire-making and audience perceptions. As new Soviet musicals began to appear on Czechoslovak stages in the early 1970s, serving as obligatory Soviet titles, audiences were not very approving, even as the official discourse created a completely different image. The case study of the 1971 Prague production of the Soviet musical Nobody Is Happier Than Me by Andrei Eshpai shows the impact of cultural politics on the theatre industry, how the discourse balanced the unpopularity of the show and its political importance and how the production was perceived by various agents involved in it. Research on this previously untouched area can shed light on the cultural mechanisms of late communism in Czechoslovakia, the nature of popular culture in communist states and the relationship between the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Billy Elliot: The Musical addresses the issue of class that, while seldom analysed as a theme in Broadway musicals, has been a key trope of the majority of British musicals since the première of The Shop Girl in 1894. The article examines how the dialectic of dance as an emblem of individual freedom opposed to the rigidity of the British class system is expressed through movement within the mining community of Easington. By utilizing various aspects of Rudolf Laban’s effort theory, including the kinetic personality patterns of his associate, Warren Lamb, the article examines the cultural gendering of movement via the strict regimes of boxing (for boys) and ballet (for girls). With brief references to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Brecht’s praxis of Gestus, the article illustrates how Billy’s ability to embrace a supposedly ‘feminine’ kinetic vocabulary constitutes the flexibility to free himself from the rigid and inherently homophobic definition of conventional masculinity. In promoting movement beyond the confines of an outmoded tradition of working-class behaviour, Billy embraces a classless notion of postmodern masculinity represented in the bohemian milieu of the metropolitan artist. By ‘dancing’ his freedom for the Royal Ballet’s audition panel in ‘Electricity’, Billy embodies his own liberation from the repetitive pattern of movement that inevitably sends the miners to early graves while he flies upwards to defy the typical destiny of a miner. The article explicates key moments of movement and dance in order to exemplify the embodiment of the musical’s central tropes in kinetic terms.

Maurice Chevalier, Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand, Édith Piaf, Charles Trenet – all these names refer to the close connection between French chanson and French cinema of the first half of the twentieth century. This article examines two dimensions of cultural mobility that align through a differentiated understanding of the artistic liaison between the popular music genre of French chanson and French musical films during the first decades of cinematic sound. First, the significant role and excessive use of the chanson will be examined along the parameters of cultural integration, distribution and transfer, all of which are inseparably linked to questions of cultural and social identity in the French musical of the 1930s and 1940s. Second, the formation, establishment and impact of the singer–actor as a professional field within the cinematic sphere will be discussed from the perspectives of mobility and migration. The methodologically areal term ‘space’ will be enhanced by notions of social and cultural mobility recently brought forth by the cultural disciplines. This article helps to decipher aspects of cultural mobility in French musical films and sheds light on the potential for the cinema in increasing music’s mobility.

Persecution and expulsion due to Nazi terror and the Second World War led to massive population shifts within Europe. First was the mass exodus from the German Reich, as a result of racist and political persecution. Then, after the end of the war, millions of German refugees and up to 12 million displaced persons – former forced labourers and foreign concentration camp prisoners – had to find new homes or be repatriated. These movements led to the discursive negotiation of wandering, mobility and settledness in German language musical theatre of the 1950s. This article analyses such relations by looking at the musicals Feuerwerk (1950) and Katharina Knie (1957) and focusing on their structures, receptions and evolutions; in both cases, special attention is paid to the dream ballets. Both musicals (at that time referred to as ‘musical comedies’ or ‘musical folk plays’) premiered at Munich’s Gärtnerplatztheater and, as part of their plots, thematize the nomadic life of circus people opposed to a settled existence.

Review of: Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America, Jake Johnson (2019)

Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 199 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-25208-433-1, p/bk, $25.00

Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America, Jake Johnson (2021)

Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 159 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-25208-599-4, p/bk, $24.95